A Multi-Level Study On The Job Crafting And Is Influence Mechanism Of Front-Line Employees In The Hospitality Industry

Due to the importance and the overall growth of the hospitality industry in the world market,the service setting and management practices of providing high-quality services have received widespread attention.In the hospitality industry,front-line employees who have direct contact with customers and are responsible for service delivery play a key role in improving the performance of the enterprises.How to predict and explain service performance has been widely discussed at home and abroad.Research shows that proactivity is the key factor affecting service performance.Scholars call for more research on proactive work behavior in the important field of customer service.In the relevant research of proactivity,job crafting is an important and hot concept.It emphasizes bottom-up,initiated by employees themselves,and even completed their own job redesign without the knowing of their leaders.By changing the task boundary,cognition or relationship boundary of the job,more job meaning and job identity can be obtained.job crafting has been proved to be an important way for employees to exert their initiative to improve job experience and results.The predecessors have established sufficient evidence to show that job crafting has a positive effect on job performance,but in the hospitality industry,there is still a lack of research on the impact mechanism of front-line employees’ job performance from the perspective of job crafting,and even less on the impact factors of front-line employees’ job crafting behavior.Therefore,this paper has made research on the influencing factors and mechanism of job crafting on service performance.Further,due to the differences of the job crafting performance in different groups,the job of front-line employees has unique characteristics,such as high-level customer participation,synchronization of production and consumption,etc.Therefore,this paper argues that in the context of hospitality industry,employees’ job crafting behavior and its influencing factors may be different from the traditional workers.For example,their job crafting would be highly related to customers,and may create more job resources than other jobs from the high-quality interaction with customers,thus will generate more job crafting behaviors.Therefore,this paper first defined the concept of job crafting of the front-line employees,and revised the scale.Secondly,after sorting out the research on job crafting,we found that the research on the antecedents of job crafting is relatively insufficient.If job crafting has an important impact on service performance,the factors affect it will be a important and interesting problem.We study the influencing factors and mechanisms from both of the individual and team levels.Previous studies have considered individual personality characteristics,leadership style,job characteristics and other factors respectively,laying a good foundation for the study of the antecedents of job crafting,but no studies have integrated these factors,let alone the interaction of these factors.This study integrated these important factors,and gives a more comprehensive and in-depth perspective on the influencing factors and boundary conditions of job crafting.This paper integrates the self-determined theory and the AMO(capability-motivation-opportunity)theory,and constructs a multi-level model of the service performance of front-line employees in the service industry which influence by individual job crafting and team job crafting through individual factors(individual empathy),leadership factors(authoritarian leadership and benevolent leadership),extra-organizational factors(customer empowerment behavior)and team factors(team empathy and team job crafting),The possible interaction between these factors are also examined.Through a questionnaire survey of front-line employees in 10 high level hotels in Chinese Mainland at three time points(290 questionnaires from 77 teams),this study found that:(1)compared with the manufacturing industry and traditional administrative employees,the job crafting of front-line employees in the hospitality industry does show unique characteristics,so we revised the scale of this concept.(2)Customers can encourage the performance of front-line employees without contributing specific knowledge or participating in service delivery,for example,by authorizing the front-line employees.Customer empowering behavior is an important antecedent of the job crafting of front-line employees in the hospitality contexts,in which psychological empowering plays an medium role.(3)Authoritarian leadership is an important antecedent and boundary condition for the job crafting of front-line employees.Its negative effects are regulated by benevolent leadership.(4)In the hospitality industry,empathy is an important factor that affects the job crafting of employees,and it will form an impact from both individual and team levels.(5)Job crafting is an important antecedent of service performance,and also an important perspective to explain the differences of service performance.This study integrates many studies in the field of job crafting and service performance,and examines the interactive effects of various situational factors such as individuals,customers,leaders,and teams on job crafting,and finds that job crafting plays a part of the medium role between these situational factors and employees’ final service performance,which makes the theoretical framework and research content have both micro-analysis and macro-structure,making this study more systematic,The research conclusion can also have more explanatory power to practical problems.This study is not only a useful attempt to refine the research of job medium,but also an expansion of the interpretation perspective of service performance influence mechanism;It also enriches the research in organizational empowering,and provides a new perspective on how customers can exert influence in the service environment;This study also provides a new theoretical and empirical explanation for the mixed discovery of the relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee performance,and confirms the research conclusion that the actual impact of authoritarian leadership on employee behavior depends on certain boundary conditions;Finaly,This study provides systematic empirical research support for the effectiveness of self-determining theory in Chinese context.Therefore,this study is of theoretical and practical significance.